In less than six months, self hypnosis helped me get my license. I could finally take the L plates off my car and replace them with P Plates's.

By JA Francis

"Chance never helps those who do not help themselves." Sophocles "The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind." William James "You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself, he doesn't think you've done a permanent job."

Thank you to my dad for believing in me and to my husband Patrick for his patience and sense of humour.

That should be the end of the story but there was more to come. Something happened that showed me just how strong self-limitation can be and how it can rebound on you when you let your guard down. When my dad (who was very proud of me) and I came home, my husbands car was in the drive but too far out for me to park behind it. So my husband who was also very proud of me, tossed me the keys to his car and said "Now you have your license, you can move it."

Now something inside me said that this was not a good idea, as his car is an automatic and mine is a manual. The first lessons I had taken were in the automatic but it had been several months since then. So between the euphoria of success, the pride of my two favourite men and the knowledge that fear of doing something doesn’t mean you can’t, I took the keys and got in the car.

The car was pointing at the garage door and just needed to be inched a foot closer to it, so I could drive my car in behind it and off the street and footpath. What happened? I failed to do a mental check, I failed to think and I panicked and reacted too strongly, too quickly and very wrongly. Such can be the faults of a beginner driver.

I started the car with my right foot on the brake. I took the handbrake off and put the car in drive and the car surged. I had forgotten this about automatics, this sensation of straining to go like a dog on a leash, and I panicked. My first thought was that automatics are different with their pedals, as they are - because they don’t have a clutch pedal, but I reacted by wrongly thinking my foot was on the wrong pedal. In that split second I believed that my foot must be on the accelerator, which had caused the surge. So I took my foot off the brake and slammed it on the accelerator - mistakenly believing I was breaking!

My license and my second self caused crash on one day! I smashed the left sidelights and caused $500.00 worth of panel beating damage and put a dent in the garage door so deep that even though we straightened it out, it has never opened smoothly since. I am lucky to have a husband with a sense of humour for after he came out to find out what the big bang was, he looked at my dad, at the car, at the garage and finally at me and the three of us dissolved into manic laughter. What else could we do? I'll never live it down, they'll still be telling the story at my granchildren's weddings!

My dad wanted me to contact the Guinness book of records but I assured him that sometime-somewhere-someone would have crashed coming out of the RTA’s car park. I tend to believe it was the last of my negative chickens coming home to roost. Did it put me off driving? I admit I am more nervous of driving my husbands car than I am of driving my own but it didn’t stop me, no. I got a better job to which I could now drive and drove for half an hour there and half an hour back each day while I worked there. I became comfortable with driving and I admit, I even enjoy it sometimes.

Did it change my life? Absolutely. Not just for the 'being able to drive wherever I want to go' but because I realised that I had held myself back in other ways and now I know that I can accomplish a great deal more. If I just stop procrastinating and do the following self help plan. Set the goal, plan the goal, visualise the steps and achieve the goal. When I feel myself slipping back, I listen to a self hypnosis cd and remind myself of what it is I want to achieve. Wendi’s financial abundance cd is next on my list. I’m planning on going to Europe in two years, there are Art Galleries there and paintings I’ve always wanted to see.

                       We normally call this the END but wasn't it really the BEGINNING...

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